Sunday, August 19, 2012

I'm late! So much for getting these posted on Friday afternoon. I couldn't even get it together to post on Saturday this week!In our homeschool... this turned out to be another of those weeks that started strong but didn't necessarily finish strong. We hadn't planned any school for Thursday, and only a light day on Friday, but as it happened, we didn't do much school at all on Friday because we were very busy and on top of that Spencer wasn't feeling well. I had hoped we'd have the backyard compass laid out completely on Friday, but with Spencer being ill, we have left that for the beginning of the next week. The stakes are in place so all we need to do is measure our cardinal line and then we can finish.

late afternoon shadow

In History, Landon and Kennady and I learned about the Dutch and Swedish settlements in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. This had some personal interest for us as we visited Hudson, NY a few summers ago; we have previously lived in NJ; and we live near and can visit Delaware. The next lesson focused on another of our neighbor states, Pennsylvania, and its founder, William Penn. (I posted History Lesson: St Mary's City telling a little of what we learned the previous week and sharing our field trip to the historic site.) We also learned about the first printers in the colonies, and that the first book printed in America was the Bay Psalm Book. We've also been reading The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare together. Kennady finished her Pilgrim costume and had fun modelling that for us.

Kennady also did some artwork - something she had to draw from memory, which was this lighthouse. We compared it to the picture and she did a really good job. She also drew the birdbath and got a very good likeness of that. I am impressed with the art instruction book she is using! (ARTistic Pursuits)

In other news... it was a fairly uneventful week! Just the usual activities, and not many of those, although I did make more shopping trips and errand runs that I would have liked. On Friday night we had company and made grilled and smoked salmon for dinner. It started raining so the guys rigged up a cookhouse tent on our deck. Which made us think that maybe we need an awning out there, we liked it so well!

A parting shot... These are not great pictures, but the mockingbird and catbird have been arguing over who has the rights to one of the trees in our yard. I managed to get pictures of them - they were both in the same tree at the same time. Pretty entertaining!

This post is linked to iHomeschool Network - see how summer is winding down for other homeschoolers!